Christina M. Rodriguez

Interests: Child clinical psychology primarily interested in abusive and dysfunctional parenting, child emotional well-being, and their interaction. I have concentrated my current research program on understanding factors that exacerbate parental risk for physical abuse, particularly psychological distress and cognitive processes that increase the likelihood that a parent will transition from using physical discipline to harsher and ultimately abusive discipline. Most recently, I have focused on identifying innovative assessment strategies that would permit greater confidence in our abuse risk assessments. I have also considered how such parental disciplinary behaviors and abuse risk are associated with children’s internalizing difficulties, such as the development of depressive and anxious symptomatology, paying particular attention to potential cognitive mechanisms that can be transmitted intergenerationally.

Objectives
The present investigation reports on the development and initial validation of a new analog task, the Parent-Child Aggression Acceptability Movie Task (P-CAAM), intended to assess respondents’ acceptance of parent-child aggression, includ...

Using a multitrait—multimethod approach, measures designed to assess emotional distress in medical populations were compared with depression measures standardized on healthy children. In a hospitalized sample of children ages 4 to 12 years old, paren...

Although considerable research has investigated parenting stress and children’s externalizing behavior problems, comparatively less has considered parenting stress in relation to children’s internalizing difficulties. Even less research on parenting ...

Objectives:
We attempted to identify factors that can be applied in primary and secondary prevention programs and expand the understanding of why those who were not abused may engage in abusive behavior. The purpose of this research was to explore h...

Examined the utility of a new parent-report measure designed specifically for pediatric inpatients, the Behavioral Upset in Medical Patients-Revised (BUMP-R). The BUMP-R was administered to 151 mothers of hospitalized children ages 4-12 years the day...

Although the concept of a cycle of violence presumes that the transmission of violence is expressed directly across generations, the role of the overall quality of the parent-child relationship may ultimately be more influential in later parenting be...

A model of women’s readiness to terminate an abusive relationship was examined, using cognitive and emotional factors to predict readiness to change as conceptualized in the transtheoretical model. Factors previously identified in the domestic violen...

Investigated depression, anxiety, and attributional style in learning-disabled (LD) and non-LD children. Subjects included 11 children who were new to an LD class, 20 who had been in LD classes for more than 1 year, and a control group of 31 non-spec...

Reduction of ineffective parenting is promoted in parent training components of mental health treatment for children with externalizing behavior disorders, but minimal research has considered whether disciplinary style and lower abuse risk could also...

Recent attention to multicultural issues has sparked recognition that parenting is also a culturally construed phenomenon. The present study involved a diverse sample of 90 Anglo-American and Hispanic parents examining predictors based on distal/prox...

To explore cognitive and emotional factors that may exacerbate child-abuse potential among domestic violence victims, 80 participants reported on their depression, hopelessness, anxiety, and anger as well as their attachment style and attributional s...

The present investigation predicted that greater use of corporal punishment as well as physical maltreatment would be associated with child abuse potential and selected parenting styles. Three independent studies were examined, two with community sam...

The current study investigated differences in children’s emotional functioning as a product of their parents’ reported disciplinary practices and child abuse potential. Families with no known history of abuse were recruited to ascertain whether depre...

Most research on parenting stress and abuse factors in parents of children with developmental disabilities has relied almost exclusively on Caucasian, middle-income, intact families. The current study investigated the generalizability of previous fin...

Data from three studies provide new evidence to support the validity of the Analog Parenting Task (APT) as an instrument to assess risk for harsh, physically aggressive parenting. In this series of studies, there was a strong association between APT...

Objective: This study examined how childhood history of discipline (1) related to ratings of how severe and typical punishments were; and (2) predicted parents’ use of discipline techniques. The influence of child culpability on these ratings was als...

Objective
Researchers in the child maltreatment field have traditionally relied on explicit self-reports to study factors that may exacerbate physical child abuse risk. The current investigation evaluated an implicit analog task utilizing eye tracki...

This study examined statistically the differential relationships among child domain and parent domain scores of the Parenting Stress Index (PSI) and child disruptive behaviors as measured by the problem and intensity scales of the Eyberg Child Behavi...

Progress in the child maltreatment field depends on refinements in leading models. This study examines aspects of social information processing theory (Milner, 2000) in predicting physical maltreatment risk in a community sample. Consistent with this...

Despite its relatively short history, policies connected with Affirmative Action have endured a controversial social, political, and legal past. Higher education has witnessed much of this controversy firsthand. Because the venue of many Affirmative ...

Objective
Relatively little research has investigated the connection between religiosity and physical child abuse risk. Certain aspects, such as specific religious orientation or beliefs, and cognitive schema, such as socially conformist beliefs, ma...